Okay, I was just surfing and glanced at the Breeder’s Cup points. Lost in the Fog is undefeated and has an overwhelming lead in the standings, and yet he needs to be supplemented into the Breeder’s Cup. Someone with more far-reaching resources, please tell me this was an error on the part of the site manager.
Hi,
Just like in FF, horses need to be nominated to the Breeders’ Cup races. Here’s a link to some info. about that:
http://www.ntra.com/content.aspx?type=other&id=14282&style=purple
If the horse is not nominated, then owners must pay a supplemental fee to enter the horses. Here’s a link:
http://horseracing.about.com/library/weekly/aa101601a.htm
Hope that explains everything for you. 
The exception to Tom’s statement is that FF doesn’t allow supplemental nomination. 
I might set it up eventually in the future, but I don’t really see the need at the moment.
Woops, sorry if I caused any confusion. I guess I should have clarified that FF does not have a supplemental fee for BC races.
I don’t think you did, Tom, I just pre-emptively clarified to avoid causing confusion.
no supplementals? That stinks. I have a Ch. 2 year old and another Ch. that I wanted to enter, but ah well. Definatly not the end of the world .
If there were supplemental fees, it would list them on the nominations page, and talk about them in the FAQ. Given that it does neither, they’re not a factor in FF.
Oh, I see … I didn’t realize that horse had to be nominated that young. Makes more sense now, although with situations like this it seems a little … how shall I put this … unfair?
Not really…it’s supper cheap (per horse) to nominate a foal to the BC…I think it’s something like $500 or $1,000? (I’m pretty sure for real-life BC stud stuff it’s just 1 stud fee, which seems a bit low, considering how many mares per year a stud gets). Per foal crop, though, it can get pretty pricey to nominate a bunch of foals. And really, even if it is only $500 or $1,000, people aren’t going to spend that if they don’t think the horse has the pedigree/potential to get to the BC.
So no, it’s not really that unfair…it’s how racing works. You either take a risk and nominate the horse for cheap when it’s young and risk having that money wasted by the horse never being good enough (or getting injured in training and never racing at all, etc), or you don’t nominate them that young and you pay for it later by having to spend a ton of money on a late nomination.
Edit: the above relates to real-life BC nominations, not FF nominations
There are 2 or 3 horses who’d be contenders for the Classic this year (Surf Cat, Lava Man or something like that) who aren’t going b/c the owners can’t afford or don’t want to spend the money for supplemental nominations.
This year we had open BC nominations due to it being the first year FOR nominations, so any horse born was eligible to be nominated this year. So I don’t really see what’s not fair about it… especially this year.
The BC is going to need a lot of supplementals paid. Has anyone else noticed the extreme retiring/waiting for 2006 going on this year due to injuries, etc.
I searched and found 24 horses that would have been in the BC were either retired to stud/brood or were waiting till 2006.